Council Won’t Put Police Issue on Ballot : Government: Police union proposal to add 400 officers is rejected by a 6-3 vote. Opponents said no one answered where the money would come from.

Unable to locate enough money to hire hundreds of new police officers by the end of 1996, the San Diego City Council voted Tuesday against placing a proposal on the June ballot that could have added more than 400 officers within the next five years.

Only three of the council’s nine members supported the proposal, which had been promoted by the San Diego Police Department’s labor union. The other six members said they could not place the measure on the ballot without telling voters exactly what city services would be cut in order to hire the new officers.

“We all know that if you place this on the ballot, everyone would vote to say, ‘More police,’ ” Councilman George Stevens said. “But we have to commit where the money is going to come from, whether it is going to be reducing services and whether we are going to assess our constituents. To do otherwise is a lack of leadership.”

A spokesman for the police union said the group will try to get enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot anyway.

Councilmen Ron Roberts, Tom Behr and Bob Filner announced at a January press conference sponsored by the Police Officers Assn. that they would back a proposal to add 1,400 officers to the force by 1999. In the past month, the proposed measure was scaled down to include the hiring of 427 officers by 1996 at a cost of $65 million.

Rather than seek a ratio of 2.4 officers per 1,000 San Diego residents by the end of the decade, union leaders agreed to reduce the ratio to 2 officers per 1,000 by 1996.

The city now has 1.65 officers per 1,000, the second lowest of the 10 largest U.S. cities.

Once the goal of two officers was achieved, proposed ballot language called for forming a special panel, to include the district attorney, presiding judge of the Superior Court and the head of the San Diego Crime Commission, to re-evaluate police protection.

None of the three councilmen could say how the new officers would be hired: only that the money would come from the existing budget.

But on Tuesday, nobody was willing to join Roberts, Behr and Filner. Instead, the six others voted to try to recruit a total of 250 reserve officers by 1995 to assist police. The department now has about 60 volunteer reserves, who receive limited training.

Without a clear plan on how to add sworn officers, the council unanimously instructed the city attorney to fight for San Diego’s portion of $340 million collected by the now invalid Proposition A and to put an advisory measure on the June ballot that would instruct the city to use any money awarded for more police.

The sales-tax measure, approved by a majority vote in 1988, was overturned by the California Supreme Court in December. Last week, the court refused to reconsider its decision.

It is unclear whether the money will be returned, and if it is, whether the city will see a dime of it. The city is not a defendant in the lawsuit.

Tuesday’s vote angered police union officials, who had hoped that Roberts, Behr and Filner could persuade at least two other council members to vote their way.

Harry O. Eastus, president of the Police Officers Assn., called the council vote “a big mistake” and the vote to increase the number of reserve officers “utter nonsense.”

“They all campaigned on a platform to get officers on the street and have done nothing about it,” Eastus said. “All we asked them to do is to let the people decide and they wouldn’t even do that. They cannot continue to run the city like this.”

Eastus said it will not be a problem for the union to collect the needed 82,000 valid signatures to force the measure onto the ballot.

Although the reserve program is needed, Eastus said, it is impossible to rely on a reserve officer to do what a sworn, full-time officer is paid to do.

“There’s nothing wrong with the reserves,” he said. “But they don’t work 24 hours a day and all they get is a $200-a-year uniform allowance.”

Councilman Bob Filner said adding to the reserves without making a huge increase in the sworn force is “fraudulent. Everyone’s for more community support and volunteer effort, but if you think we’re going to get the protection of this city through this kind of reserve, you’re just crazy.”

Other council members had a different perspective.

John Hartley, who proposed expansion of the reserve program, called the ballot measure “the old bait-and-switch” that would end up “cannibalizing city services” by cutting into funds set aside for libraries, the park and recreation department and other areas.

Hartley accused the three council members of doing what federal and state government often do.

“They love to put out mandates on programs without an income source,” he said.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who spoke most strongly against the ballot proposal and urged others to follow her lead, said the public has to believe that new officers “will be out on the street corner and in the neighborhood, not in some building. There’s a feeling that they are not going to be where people can see them.”